December 2015

December 31, 2015

First, let me get my anality about Seinfeld and sneakers out. There has to be a law against wearing sneakers and walking into the White House even if you are Jerry Seinfeld. If Congress can enact one worthwhile law, let it be to proscribe the wearing of sneakers within a mile of the White House. Phew! That felt good.

Seinfeld’s sneakers

With that out of the way, Jerry Seinfeld pulled off by far the coolest episode of ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee’ with President Barack Obama. The entire 19 or so minutes of the opening episode of season 7 is dripping cool and swagga. Seinfeld’s questions were sharp and funny, especially the one about those world leaders who have lost it. In between, he even slipped in the “wake up call” reference, which formed such a popular part the ‘Seinfeld’ episode about the marathon runner Jean Paul.

This is a blockbuster way to open his highly popular web series. The only problem with this is that it is unlikely that the following episodes, no matter whom it features, can out-cool this one. Seinfeld might as well drop the microphone and walk off the stage for this season. He may have more fun guests but I don’t think he can have cooler ones simply because of the office that Obama represents and, more importantly, his natural charisma and affinity for the audio-visual media.

I am not much of an automobile guy but the 1963 Corvette Stingray Split Window Coupe that the two men spun around a bit in the White House compound added to the appeal of the episode.

Notwithstanding my rather ambivalent relationship with the series, I shall continue to watch it if only to irritate myself with the smug, albeit eminently deserved, self-assuredness of Seinfeld.

* CCGC is Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and POTUS is President of the United States.

December 30, 2015

Patriotism and nationalism are a consequence of a particular time and territory. They are time-specific and territorially defined. Within those two main categories there is then the subset of culture as a source of patriotism and nationalism. They are not a historical continuum. One cannot be nationalistic and patriotic about the whole world, for example. One can be but then it will mean nothing in particular.

What feels like patriotism and nationalism in India today would have no context to exist at the height of the Indus Valley Civilization. I mention Indus Valley for a specific reason.Those who display strong nationalism in India these days usually have a vague perception of the glorious period of a Vedic India having coalesced during Indus Valley period. The usual leap that those who harbor such cultural nationalism take is India was Indus then, therefore Hindu now. I am simplifying because such assertion at the lower levels of intellectual engagement about cultural nationalism stems from such simplified definition.

The point of writing this post is something slightly different. As Jason Burke reports in The Guardian, a major breakthrough in the enduring question about who the people of the Indus Valley Civilization were close to 5000 years ago is about to be known. Vasant Shinde, an archeologist leading the excavation of the major Indus site at Rakhigadhi in Haryana, has been quoted as saying that DNA analysis of four skeletons, two men, one woman and a child, found at the site is expected to soon reveal the origin of the Indus Valley people. Whether they were the indigenous people, migrants who came from the west or a combination of the two is often at the heart of a heated debate among cultural nationalists. For them it is essential that the Indus Valley people are determined to be indigenous in order to support the argument of the high advancement of India’s ancient civilization with roots in the Vedas. Any indication that the Indus people may have been a product of intermixing could be disappointing for many people.

Having been born and grown up in Ahmedabad I have been very familiar with Lothal, described as one of the most important Harappan sites. Barely 80 kilometers from the city to its northwest, Lothal was an urban settlement with meticulous town planning. It was a major manufacturing center for steatite beads. Meticulous urban town planning has been the hallmark of the Indus Valley / Harappan Civilization whose period is said to be 3500 BC to 2000 BC, which make them between 4000 and 5500 years old. The area covered by the civilization was bigger than (1600 kilometers by 1600 kilometers) the contemporary Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations. For some inexplicable reasons, Indus is not as celebrated in the world. That could be because it was not a civilization built on conquest.

Cultural nationalists take the liberty of conveniently describing this civilization to be the core of their cultural pride even as they are compelled to shift its geographical home much to the east in modern times that forms the nation-state of India. Even the much popular idea of Akhand Bharat* (United India) jumps back and forth over millennia to claim India as manifest in Indus or India as it was during latter times of the great empire of the Mauryan king Ashoka (304 B.C.-232 B.C.) or even before the invasions by the Central Asian marauders began about 1000 years ago. It is not for me to contest any of these because it is a futile exercise. People can draw their cultural pride from whatever source they choose.

I am only pointing this out in light of the impending DNA analysis of the Indus skeletons and the vast known expanse of the Indus Valley Civilization how nationalism and patriotism are time-specific and territorially defined. I do not know if the Indus people had a comparable sense of cultural pride that can be said to be nationalistic the way many in India now practice. One is not sure if they even knew the extent of the spread of their civilization in such specific terms that we know today of theirs or our own.

I doubt if territorially-defined patriotism even existed in early people. It may well have but it seems implausible. I say this because for nationalism and patriotism to exist it is necessary that they are conveyed among a people on a sustained basis. How else would the residents of Lothal feel any affinity with those in Rakhigadhi? The kind of specificity we now accord cultural and national pride in terms of markers such rituals, philosophies, sects, monuments, inventions and so on, have evolved over a long period.

I was thinking of all this also because of Indian Prime Minster Narendra Modi’s visit to Lahore to meet Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on December 25. Much of what we call Indus Valley is now part of Pakistan. In a very real way, Modi and Sharif are descendants of the very Indus people, coming as they do from Gujarat and Punjab respectively. It is fascinating how the region that was once intrinsic to the riparian Indus civilization for thousands of years now forms the core an enduring conflict. I was also thinking about it because of a Hindu ideologue still talking in terms of Akhand Bharat although for him it usually means India as it existed before the 1947 partition, stretching from what is now Bangladesh on the east to Pakistan to the west up to the border of Afghanistan. Those are fancy ideas which have no basis in reality.

I am not quite sure what the point of the post is but whatever it is, it is before you. If you find it pointless, so be it. It is not as if you pay me to enlighten you on a daily basis.

* Akhand Bharat as it is used now is a political controversial term that makes the sovereign nations of Pakistan and Bangladesh rather irate.

December 29, 2015

My current artistic fascination is the Mexican master Diego Rivera whom I rediscovered while watching the 2002 movie “Frida” featuring Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina. I will write about Rivera in the next few days. For today, I am just offering a work I did prompted by Rivera’s 1908 painting titled ‘Street in Avila’.

Street in Avila, Diego Rivera, 1908

Here are my four versions, the one at the bottom being the first one.

Tribute Street of Avila, All four by Mayank Chhaya

The problem with closely studying works by the masters is that one feels paralyzed by one’s desperate lack of any discernible talent. However, one persists.

December 28, 2015

Yesterday was the 218th birth anniversary of of Mirza Ghalib, one of the world’s greatest poet-philosophers who lived in Delhi. Ghalib is the poetic benchmark against which all great poetry in the Urdu language is tested. However, as he himself had said “There may be better poets than me but my manner of saying it stands apart.”

There have been some remembrances about the poet in the Indian media but those have been mainly standard issue variety. Ghalib’s life as a poet-philosopher checked all the enduring stereotypes about poets and their self-absorption. One of his relatively less known quirks—at least outside those who keep track of the Ghalib folklore—was his obsessive love for mangoes. What’s not to love in mangoes? I also love mangoes and I am also a poet but the two do not add up to anywhere close to the genius of Ghalib. If only loving mangoes made poets out of people almost all of India would be.

There is a famous story about someone asking Ghalib about his opinion of mangoes. He was quoted as saying that they should be sweet and they should be numerous. That’s all he asked for. Prompted by that I wrote these two lines as a tribute to Ghalib.

लोग पूछते हैं मुझसे सिफत-ए-अम्बाह

आम बेशुमार हो और मीठा हो बस वही इल्तज़ाह

--मयंक छाया

(Log puchhte hain mujhse sifat-e-ambaah

Aam beshumar ho aur meetha ho bas wahi iltzaah)

People ask me about the attributes of mangoes

Let them be countless and sweet is my only request

There is a ghazal I had written last year as a tribute to Ghalib. Here are two verses from that:

December 27, 2015

This is the best image of the Quasar 3C273 located some 3 billion light years away in the constellation of Virgo. (Pic: Hubble Telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2- ESA/Hubble & NASA)

The idea of distance at a cosmological scale is a mindfuck.* Because the universe is in a constant state of flux and expansion what we call distance on Earth between two fixed points loses its meaning immediately.

In reading up various explanations about cosmological distance and differentiation such as co-moving distance and proper distance I am back to using my favorite umbrella term to describe incomprehensible cosmic phenomena simply as the inelegantly descriptive mindfuck.

The question of distance came while reading about the Quasar 3C273, the first quasi-stellar radio source to have been observed in 1963. It was Dr. Maarten Schmidt, a Caltech astronomer who in 1963 determined that the emission lines in 3C273’s spectrum were hydrogen that was highly redshifted. When a luminous object moves away in the cosmos, its spectral line shift toward the red end of the spectrum. The greater the redshift the more distant the object.

The distance of 3 billion light years in 1963 and during many decades since made 3C273 the most distant object observed. For those of you who like your distance in miles, that would be about 12 billion trillion miles, not that it would make any better sense at all.

I turn to such themes only as an escape from the mundane, especially when I sense an impending problem in personal life. It is like waiting for our Sun to turn into a red giant to resolve immediate personal problems but unfortunately it is still five billion years away. Coming back to 3C273 and how its scale helps harmonize my upended life, that cloud streak that you see to its left top, alone is 200,000 light years across. To give you a comparison, our home galaxy Milky Way is just 100,000 light years across; the entire galaxy at whose obscure corner we reside. That is the size of 3C273.

Now consider this. Since the observation of 3C273, we have found hundreds of quasars, the farthest one of which as of 2011is said to be ULAS J1120+0641 whose co-moving distance from us is 28.85 billion light years from us. If you wonder how it is that in a universe 13.5 billion years old we have something that is 28.85 billion light years from us, well you will be perfectly justified. The simple answer is mindfuck. The more complex one, which I am not even remotely qualified to cogently explain, has to do with co-moving distance and proper distance. Proper distance is about where a particular object may be at a particular time on the cosmological timescale. It keeps changing because the universe keeps expanding. Co-moving distance is the distance that excludes the expansion of the universe. Like I said, mindfuck.

If you are wondering why I suddenly write about 3C273 and ULAS J1120+0641, well it is because they need no news peg on our ridiculous 24/7 news cycle.

* I hereby claim authorship of mindfuck as a serious scientific unit to describe anything indescribable.

December 26, 2015

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Whoa! Did he really do that?” visit to Lahore yesterday represents a polar switch in India’s politics. He is doing everything on Pakistan that the once ruling Congress Party and its Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wanted to do but couldn’t. In a sense, the Congress is not taking yes for an answer.

The gist of the Congress Party’s rather swift denunciation of the Modi visit seems to be “How can you do what we wanted to do but you didn’t let us do it?” It is a fair point to make that had Dr. Singh pulled what Modi did he would have been derided the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) grandees, particularly the selfsame Narendra Modi, as a naïve peacenik.

However, the Congress’s objection seems to stem from “We should have done what you did” even though the more eloquent members of the party have been pointing out a lack of specificity to the Modi government’s approach to Pakistan. It is obvious that Prime Minister Modi has taken a page straight out of Dr. Singh’s playbook where he envisioned a day when Indians can have breakfast in Kabul, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Delhi. He did precisely that yesterday and caused in the Congress Party some measure of jealousy because it was their idea.

As an aside, let me point out that over 90 percent citizens of the three countries in question in the Kabul breakfast-Lahore lunch-Delhi dinner dream would never come anywhere close to affording a trip like that. In fact, many of them already find it hard to have one of the three meals even in their own neighborhood now given their chronic poverty. So let’s spare the grandiosity.

My broad sense of Modi’s visit to Lahore is that there is an unstated but conscious effort by the Indian prime minister and his closest advisers to bolster the democratic political order in Pakistan by standing by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif by bypassing the military establishment even if it does not lead to an enduring peace in the short-term. Of course, Sharif cannot afford to be seen to be propped up by a Hindu nationalist prime minister from India but to the extent that he feels encouraged to assert his political writ as the democratically elected leader of Pakistan it is a good thing. In whatever discreet ways the Modi government can make functioning easier for the Sharif administration on the question of relations with India it helps the Pakistani prime minister.

It would be foolish to suggest that any Indian government can talk to the political establishment over the military one and hope to achieve a lasting peace. However, it is equally important that India, a giant stable democracy in Pakistan’s neighborhood not to mention as an inexhaustible source of Pakistan’s existential anxieties, remains steadfast in its support to the neighbor’s democratic struggles.

It is undeniable that there is also such flagrant hypocrisy in the BJP’s view of Pakistan. There is no way to square the current brotherly bonhomie between Modi and Sharif with the BJP chief and the prime minister’s closets political confidant Amit Shah wanting to pack off off all those who don't vote for the their party to Pakistan as a punishment. The party may be brilliant at taking the quintessential Indian idea of situational logic to its extreme but at some point people will begin to see through the game. Pakistan cannot be both a penal colony for any Indian who says something even mildly critical of the India as envisioned by the BJP as well as the key piece of Modi’s peace legacy. The situational logic completely falls apart here.

It is futile to apportion blame and distribute credit at this stage. It would be best for both the BJP and Congress to tap into a measure of maturity which I suspect both are capable of. After all, peace between India and Pakistan will have not just great consequence for close to 1.5 billion people living in the two countries but the whole of South Asia, including Afghanistan, and therefore the world. Let’s not get distracted by sideshows like dogs by squirrels.

Waking up to the news of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi “dropping by” on his Pakistani vis-à-vis Nawaz Sharif in Lahore en route from Moscow via Kabul to New Delhi has its own edification and a measure of regret for not being there as a journalist.

At a superficial level the drop-by diplomacy is in keeping with Modi’s penchant for doing things which has a touch of the spectacle, especially because he was in Moscow on his first visit as prime minister and then swung by in Kabul and finally in Lahore. That it was Sharif’s 66th birthday today as well as his granddaughter Meherun Nisa’s wedding merely added to that perception.

One way to look at the quick visit is to respond anally and with barely hidden disdain like the main opposition Congress Party which is attributing “corporate” motives to the visit in rejecting it as an “adventure.” There may well be an element of that but that is beside the point.

The Congress Party’s contention that the visit was in line with Modi’s ability to stage-manage events and headlines around them has considerable truth to it. However, there is nothing inherently wrong with diplomacy of spectacle as long as it is followed diplomacy of substance. For the sake or argument even if substance does not follow spectacle, it is still better than diplomacy of acrimony.

Remaining steadfast to what a Congress Party spokesman, Dr. Abhishek Singhvi calls “hard-nosed diplomacy” is generally a sane piece of advice but it has not got the two countries anywhere over the past six decades. They remain their usual love-hate (more hate than love), manic-depressive selves while dealing with each other even as their relationship degenerates into bloody murderousness on a regular basis from the Pakistani side. The point is nothing much has worked and precisely for that reason something out of the ordinary has to be attempted even though there is nothing particularly unique about such impulsive diplomacy.

It is tempting for the spinmeisters on both sides of the India-Pakistan border to project Modi’s visit as spontaneous. We all know that would be an absurd claim to make because heads of state, the least of all those in India and Pakistan, do not just show up in another’s country without any preparation whatsoever. Just off the bat there are considerable logistics involved for an Indian prime minister to show up in Lahore to meet a Pakistani prime minister, including flight plans, security and transport not to mention something as trivial as travel documents. It is not as if Prime Minister Modi’s entourage simply showed up at Lahore’s Allama Iqbal International Airport and said, “Dekhiye hum to aa gaye hain. Ab zara visa fiza lagva do to aapke wazir-e-azam se bhi ruh-b-ruh ho len. (Look, we are here now. Let’s get visas stamped so that we can meet your prime minister.)

I am willing to believe that the visit was not planned in the sense that it happened when Modi called Sharif to wish him on his birthday and the latter made the gracious gesture of hosting for lunch to coincide with family wedding. While on the subject of planning, Modi couldn’t have possible said, “Sharifsahab main padause hi main hoon to aap ko milke jata hoon.” (Mr. Sharif, I am in the neighborhood. So I might as well meet you.) That’s because the distance between Delhi and Lahore is nearly half (about 427 kilometers) compared to the distance between Kabul and Lahore (about 806 kilometers). Being in Delhi and Lahore the two are closer neighborhood at all times.

I would be remiss if I did not point out the jarring dichotomy between the way Modi the election campaigner viewed and described both Pakistan and Sharif with rancid contempt and mistrust and the way Modi the prime minister has conducted himself with the two. Even while mildly applauding him for adapting himself to the realities of his office, I would still remind him of his own contempt for his predecessor, the impossibly soft-spoken Dr. Manmohan Singh’s conciliatory approach toward Pakistan.

That Modi is the first Indian prime minister to visit Pakistan in a decade is neither here nor there in terms of what his visit might do to move the dial away from harrowingly love-hate, manic-depressive relationship to a more constructive neighborliness. For its part, the Congress should be happy that the prime minister is engaging with Pakistan without overt rancor as the party itself has been advocating.

December 23, 2015

It is literally rocket science, something I have no clue about, but even I know that the rise of reusable rockets can and will make humans a multi-planetary species.

The extraordinary success of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to deliver its payload, 11 satellites, and return to Earth marks perhaps the most important step toward human planetary settlements.

The Falcon 9 rocket that delivered 11 satellites and reentered successfully on December 21. (Pic: A screengrab from SpaceX video)

Until now rockets have been disposable one-time carriers that lead to very high cost of any space exploration. But in the success of Elon Musk and his company SpaceX’s Falcon 9 success humans have crossed a decisive threshold.

As SpaceX points out most rockets burn on reentry but theirs are designed not only to withstand the destructive frictional heat of reentry but even land precisely, ready to be reused. Musk calls the old technology akin to flying a commercial airliner such as Boeing or Airbus just once and discarding instead of using them thousands of times as we do.

The ability for rockets to go to neighboring planets or moons and return to Earth is a revolutionary one. It is no surprise that Musk is already talking in terms of setting up a city on Mars. Of course, the reusable rocket technology will have to be proven to work consistently before the world, or at any rate space-faring countries, takes the crucial step of inhabiting Mars or even our own Moon.

Whether humans becoming a multi-planetary species is a good idea or not is not the debate I would like to get into while giving it up for Musk and his team for pulling their mission off. It has been pointed out that the cost advantages that SpaceX offers for launches at about $60 million a launch for low-earth orbit are remarkable.

There is already some buzz about using the low cost and reusability factors to launch hundreds of satellites to provide internet connections worldwide. That some of those connections will be used to download Kimojis or Kim Kardashian emojis is something neither Musk or his rocket scientists can do anything about. For your edification I have given below a snapshot of Kimojis here taken from the redoubtable self-promoter’s Twitter account. I never thought that I would use something as path-breaking as reusable rockets and Kim Kardashian in the same sentence but here I am. At the very least, I might get some boost in the number of visitors to the blog.

December 22, 2015

I hesitate to label individuals because we all carry our own little labels. I am sure there is one for me somewhere but since I am of next to no consequence I don’t get to hear it. Donald Trump on the other hand is a different story. I feel now confident enough to call him a vulgarian after he used the word “schlong” in the context of Hillary Clinton.

I like words, any and all words because they are a fine illustration of what sets the human species apart from the rest of the sentient world. So to that limited extent I thank Trump for introducing me to a new word even if it means a penis in Yiddish.

Now to the point about why he is a true vulgarian. A vulgarian is defined by the Webster’s dictionary as “A vulgar person, especially one whose vulgarity is the more conspicuous because of wealth, prominence or pretensions to good breeding.” If a word ever fit a person, it would be this.

At a public rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, yesterday he was quoted as saying, "She (Clinton) was going to beat Obama.... She was going to beat - she was favored to win - and she got schlonged. She lost. She lost." When you use someone getting “schlonged” in the context of a woman, it can possibly mean only one thing. I needn’t tell you what that is.

You should not be surprised to know that Trump’s constituents do not quite mind his language about any group or individuals. In fact, they mostly lap it up. They like him for what he is and for someone who barely needs reinforcement or vindication for anything that is more than enough. Trump is in a permanent reinforcement loop about himself. He has gone so far now that it is futile for him to return to a semblance of decency. There are women in Trump’s family and it would be interesting to find out how he might respond if another alpha male or any male or female for that reason used the same expression about one of them.

I think it may be time again to ask what Russia’s President Vladimir Putin thinks of Trump saying Clinton “got schlonged”.